Queen or “any flax-wench”?: Household Metaphor and Female Duality in The Winter’s Tale

Why, as audiences have felt, when Queen Hermione obeys her husband King Leontes’ request to persuade their guest Polixenes to stay longer in Sicily at the opening of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, is she then mistrusted, with such devastating results?

A small moment in the play’s primary source, Robert Greene’s Pandosto, or the Triumph of Time, may underlie her complex, eventful portrayal.  Greene’s Queen Bellaria appears with her husband at the beginning of the romance to greet his friend Egistus at his arrival, but King Pandosto himself, not his wife, persuades the friend to remain longer at his court. Bellaria strives to show Egistus courtesy when he arrives at the royal home, taking to heart her responsibility for domestic arrangements suitable for a guest: “often times coming herself into his bed chamber to see that nothing should be amiss to [dis]like him” (5). Despite the narrator’s reassurance about “this honest familiarity,” her overzealous visits to Egistus’s bedchamber foster “a secret uniting of their affections” and hint, for the voyeuristic reader, at her real wish for a sexual rendezvous there, tapping into and seemingly validating pervasive early modern cultural suspicions about how women might covertly use the spaces of the home for their own desires.

Suspicion about the Queen’s motives reappears in The Winter’s Tale, through the figurative language of household discourse that Shakespeare employs in Hermione’s speech, and her household role as hostess.  By combining the public, ceremonial court, and the private, domestic royal space that are separate settings in…